At the bar, he and Wesley reminisced noisily over their past experiences together, all of which Everhart drank in with polite interest. Some other seamen hailed them from a corner booth, so they all carried their beers over, and an uproar of reunion ensued. Wesley seemed to know them all.
But a half hour later, Wesley rose and told Meade to meet him in the Union Hall at two thirty; and with this, he and Everhart left the bar and turned their steps toward Atlantic Avenue.
“Now for your seaman’s paper,” he said to Bill.
Atlantic Avenue was almost impossible to cross, so heavy was the rush of traffic, but once they had regained the other side and stood near a pier, Bill’s breast pounded as he saw, docked not a hundred feet away, a great gray freighter, its slanting hull striped with rust, a thin stream of water arching from its scuppers, and the mighty bow standing high above the roof of the wharf shed.
“Is that it?” he cried.
“No, she’s at Pier Six.”
They walked toward the Maritime Commission, the air heavy with the rotting stench of stockpiles, oily-waters, fish, and hemp. Dreary marine equipment stores faced the street, show windows cluttered with blue peacoats, dungarees, naval officers’ uniforms, small compasses, knives, oilers’ caps, seamen’s wallets, and all manner of paraphernalia for the men of the sea.
The Maritime Commission occupied one floor of a large building that faced the harbor. While a pipe-smoking old man was busy preparing his papers, Everhart could see beyond the nearby wharves and railroad yards, a bilious stretch of sea spanning toward the narrows, where two lighthouses stood like gate posts to a dim Atlantic. A seagull swerved past the window.
An energetic little man fingerprinted him in the next room, cigarette in mouth almost suffocating him as he pressed Bill’s inky fingers on the papers and on a duplicate.
“Now go down to the Post Office building,” panted the little man when he had finished, “and get your passport certificate. Then you’ll be all set.”
Wesley was leaning against the wall smoking when Bill left the fingerprinting room with papers all intact.
“Passport certificate next I guess,” Bill told Wesley, nodding toward the room.
“Right!”
They went to the Post Office building on Milk Street where Bill filled out an application for his passport and was handed a certificate for his first foreign voyage; Wesley, who had borrowed five dollars from Nick Meade, paid Bill’s fee.
“Now I’m finished I hope?” laughed Bill when they were back in the street.
“That’s all.”
“Next thing is to get our berths on the Westminster. Am I correct?”
“Right.”
“Well,” smiled Bill, slapping his papers, “I’m in the merchant marine.”
At two-thirty that afternoon, Wesley, Bill, Nick Meade and seven other seamen landed jobs on the S.S. Westminster. They walked from the Union Hall down to Pier Six in high spirits, passing through the torturous weave of Boston’s waterfront streets, crossing Atlantic Avenue and the Mystic river drawbridge, and finally coming to a halt along the Great Northern Avenue docks. Silently they gazed at the S.S. Westminster, looming on their left, her monstrous gray mass squatting broadly in the slip, very much, to Everhart’s astonished eyes, like an old bathtub.
CHAPTER FIVE
“She’s what we call a medium sized transport-cargo ship,” a seaman had told Everhart as they all marched down the huge shed toward the gang plank, waving greetings to the longshoremen who were busy hauling the cargo aboard, rolling oil barrels down the hold, swinging great loads of lumber below decks with the massive arm of a boom. “She does fifteen knots full steam, cruises at twelve. Not much speed—but she can weather plenty.”
And when they had shown their job slips to the guard at the gang plank and begun to mount the sagging boards, Bill had felt a strange stirring in the pit of his guts—he was boarding a ship for the first time in his life! A ship, a great proud bark back from homeless seas and bound for others perhaps stranger and darker than any it had ever wandered to . . . and he was going along!
Bill was lying in his bunk, remembering these strange sensations he had felt in the afternoon. It was now evening. From his position in an upper berth, he could see the dark wall of the dock shed through an open porthole. It was a hot breathless night. The focastle he had been assigned to was partitioned off from another by a plate of white painted, riveted steel, aft to port. Two brilliant light bulbs illuminated the small room from a steel overhead. There were two double berths, upper and lower, and a small sink; four lockers, two battered folding chairs, and a three-legged stool completed the furnishings of this bare steel chamber.
Bill glanced over at the other seaman who had been assigned to the same quarters. He was sleeping, his puckish young features calm in slumber. He couldn’t be over eighteen years old, Bill reflected. Probably had been going to sea for years despite everything.
Bill pulled the job slip from his wallet and mulled over the writing: “William Everhart, ordinary seaman, S.S. Westminster, deck crew mess boy.” Messboy! . . . William Everhart, A.B., M.A., assistant professor of English and American Literature at Columbia University . . . a mess boy! Surely, this would be a lesson in humility, he chuckled, even though he had never gone through life under the pretext that he was anything but humble, at least, a humble young pedant.
He lay back on the pillow and realized these were his first moments of solitary deliberation since making his rash decision to get away from the thoughtless futility of his past life. It had been a good life, he ruminated, a life possessing at least a minimum of service and security. But he wasn’t sorry he had made this decision; it would be a change, as he’d so often repeated to Wesley, a change regardless of everything. And the money was good in the merchant marine, the companies were not reluctant to reward the seamen for their labor and courage; money of that amount would certainly be welcomed at home, especially now with the old man’s need for medical care. It would be a relief to pay for his operation and perhaps soften his rancor against a household that had certainly done him little justice. In his absorption for his work and the insistent demands of a highly paced social life, Bill admitted to himself, as he had often done, he had not proved an attentive son; there were such distances between a father and his son, a whole generation of differences in temperament, tastes, views, habits: yet the old man, sitting in that old chair with his pipe, listening to an ancestral radio while the new one boomed its sleek, modern power from the living room, was he not fundamentally the very meaning and core of Bill Everhart, the creator of all that Bill Everhart had been given to work with? And what right, Bill now demanded angrily, had his sister and brother-in-law to neglect him so spiritually? What if he were a lamenting old man?
Slowly, now, Everhart began to realize why life had seemed so senseless, so fraught with fully lack of real purpose in New York, in the haste and oration of his teaching days—he had never paused to take hold of anything, let alone the lonely heart of an old father, not even the idealisms with which he had begun life as a seventeen-year-old spokesman for the working class movement on Columbus Circle Saturday afternoons. All these he had lost, by virtue of a sensitivity too fragile for everyday disillusionment . . . his father’s complaints, the jeers of the Red baiters and the living, breathing social apathy that supported their jeers in phlegmatic silence. A few shocks from the erratic fuse box of life, and Everhart had thrown up his hands and turned to a life of academic isolation. Yet, in the realms of this academic isolation, wasn’t there sufficient indication that all things pass and turn to dust? What was that sonnet where Shakespeare spoke sonorously of time “rooting out the work of masonry?”1 Is a man to be timeless and patient, or is he to be a pawn of time? What did it avail a man to plant roots deep into a society by all means foolish and Protean?
Yet, Bill now admitted with reluctance, even Wesley Martin had set himself a purpose, and this purpose was the ideal of life—life at sea—a Thoreau befo
re the mast. Conviction had lead Wesley to the sea; confusion had lead Everhart to the sea.
A confused intellectual, Everhart, the oldest weed in society; beyond that, an intelligent modern minus the social conscience of that class. Further, a son without a conscience—a lover without a wife! A prophet without confidence, a teacher of men without wisdom, a sorry mess of man thereat!
Well, things would be different from now on . . . a change of life might give him the proper perspective. Surely, it had not been folly to take a vacation from his bookish, bearish life, as another side of his nature might deny! What wrong was there in treating his own life, within the bounds of moral conscience, as he chose and as he freely wished? Youth was still his, the world might yet open its portals as it had done that night at Carnegie Hall in 1927 when he first heard the opening bars of Brahms’ first symphony! Yes! As it opened its doors for him so many times in his teens and closed them firmly, as though a stern and hostile master were its doorman, during his enraged twenties.
Now he was thirty-two years old and it suddenly occurred to him that he had been a fool, yes, even though a lovable fool, the notorious “short pants” with the erudite theories and the pasty pallor of a teacher of life . . . and not a liver of life. Wasn’t it Thomas Wolfe who had struck a brief spark in him at twenty-six and filled him with new love for life until it slowly dawned on him that Tom Wolfe—as his colleagues agreed in delighted unison—was a hopeless romanticist? What of it? What if triumph were Wolfe’s only purpose? . . . if life was essentially a struggle, then why not struggle toward triumph, why not, in that case, achieve triumph! Wolfe had failed to add to whom triumph was liege . . . and that, problem though it was, could surely be solved, solved in the very spirit of his cry for triumph. Wolfe had sounded the old cry of a new world. Wars come, wars go! Elated Bill to himself, this cry is an insurgence against the forces of evil, which creeps in the shape of submission to evil, this cry is a denial of the not-good and a plea for the good. Would he, then, William Everhart plunge his whole being into a new world? Would he love? Would he labor? Would he, by God, fight?
Bill sat up and grinned sheepishly.
“By George,” he mumbled aloud, “I might at that!”
“Might what?” asked the other seaman, who was awake and sitting up with his legs dangling over the bunk rail.
Bill turned a bashful face, laughing.
“Oh I was only muttering to myself.”
The young seaman said nothing. After a strained pause, he at length spoke up.
“This your first trip?”
“Yes.”
“What the hell time is it?” asked the youth.
“About nine o’clock.”
There was another silence. Bill felt he had better explain his strange behavior before his focastle mate should take him for a madman, but he couldn’t conceive of any explanation. The young seaman apparently overlooked the incident, for he wanted to know why in hell they weren’t ashore getting drunk.
Everhart explained that he was waiting to go out with two other seamen in a half-hour.
“Well, I’ll be in the mess. Pick me up on the way out,” directed the youth. “My name’s Eathington.”
“All right, we’ll do that; my name’s Everhart.”
The youngster shuffled off lazily: “Glad t’ meetcha,” he said, and was gone.
Bill vaulted down from his bunk and went to the sink for a drink of water. He leaned over and thrust his head [out] of the porthole, peering aft along the shed wall. The harbor was still and dark, except for a cluster of lights far across where a great drydock was illumined for its night shift. Two small lights, a red and a blue one, chased one another calmly across the dark face of the bay, the sound of the launch’s motor puttering quietly. From the direction of dimmed-out Boston came a deep prolonged sigh of activity.
“By God!” Bill told himself, “I haven’t felt like this in a long time. If I’m going to fight for this new world, where better than on a merchant ship laden with fighting cargoes? And if I’m going to lay my plans for a new life, where better to devise them than at sea—a vacation from life, to return brown and rugged and spiritually equipped for all its damned devious tricks!” He paced the focastle silently.
“And when I get back,” he thought, “I’ll keep my eyes open . . . if there’s anything insincere afoot in this war, I’ll smell it out, by George, and I’ll fight it! I used to have ideas a long time ago—I had spark: we’ll see what happens. I’m ready for anything . . . good Christ, I don’t believe I’ve been as downright foolish as this in a long time, but it’s fun, it’s new, and Goddamn it, it’s refreshing.”
Bill stopped in the middle of the room and appraised it curiously, adjusting his spectacles; “A ship, by George! I wonder when we sail . . .”
Laughing voices broke his reverie; it was Nick Meade and Wesley coming down the gangway.
“All set, man?” cried Wesley. “Let’s go out and drink some of my old man’s whiskey!”
“All set,” said Bill. “I’m just sitting around trying to accustom myself to the fact I’m on a ship . . .”
They went down the gangway and into the mess hall. A group of soldiers sat drinking coffee at one of the long tables.
“Who are they?” asked Bill curiously.
“Gun crew,” raced Meade.
Young Eathington was sitting alone with a cup of coffee. Bill waved at him: “Coming?” he shouted, adding quietly to Wesley: “He’s in my focastle; mind if he comes along with us?”
Wesley waved his hand; “Free booze! More the merrier.”
They passed through the galley, with its aluminum cauldrons, hanging pots and pans, a massive range and a long pantry counter. One big cook stood peering into a cauldron with a corn cob pipe clamped in his teeth; he was a big colored man, and as he stood ruminating over his steaming soup, his basso voice hummed a strange melody.
“Hey Glory!” howled Nick Meade at the giant cook. “Come on out and get drunk.”
Glory turned and removed the pipe from his mouth. “It’s a hipe!” he commented in a rumbling, moaning voice. “You boys goin’ out thar in git boozed.”
Young Eathington smiled puckishly: “What the hell d’you think, Glory? We gotta drown down the taste of your lousy soup!”
Glory’s eyes widened in simulated astonishment.
“It’s a hipe!” he boomed. “A lowdown hipe! Them little chillun are goin’ out than in git boozed.”
As they laughed their way down the midships gangway, they could hear Glory resume his humming.
“Where’s everybody on this ship?” asked Bill. “It’s deserted.”
“They’re all out drinking,” answered Meade. “Glory’s probably the only one on board now. You’ll see them all tomorrow morning at breakfast.”
“Saturday night,” added Eathington.
They were descending the gangplank.
“Hear what that big boy was singing?” Wesley said, “Them’s way down blues. Heard that singing in Virginia long time ago on a construction job. Way down blues, man.”
“Where we goin’?” asked Eathington, tilting his oiler’s cap at a jaunty angle.
“My old man’s saloon in the South End.”
“Free booze?” added Everhart, adjusting his glasses with a grin.
“Free booze?” howled Eathington, “C’mon, I’m not complainin’ . . . I blew my last pay in a Charlestown poolroom.”
In the street, they strode rapidly toward Atlantic Avenue. Nick Meade, who had signed on as an oiler, asked Eathington if he too had an engine room job.
“No; I’m on as a scullion; signed on yesterday; couldn’t get anythin’ better.”
“Then what the hell are you wearing an oiler’s cap for?” asked Meade.
The kid grinned wryly: “Just for the hell of it!”
Wesley’s face lit up with delight: “Give me that hat!” he growled “I’m gonna throw the damn thing in the drink!” He advanced toward Eathington, but the kid broke into a ru
n down the street laughing; Wesley was after him like a deer. Presently, Wesley was back wearing the cap, smiling wickedly.
“How do I look?” he asked.
They took a subway to the South End and went over to Charley Martin’s “Tavern.” It was, actually, one of the cheapest saloons Everhart had ever been privileged to enter. The planked floors were covered with sawdust and innumerable spittoons; several drunkards sprawled over their cups in the booths, and it took some time before Everhart grew accustomed to the fact that one of them was a woman with legs like sticks.
Behind the bar, tuning the radio, was a man in a bartender’s apron who looked very much like Wesley, except for his white hair and heavy jowls.
“There’s the old buck,” said Wesley, shuffling toward the bar. His father turned and saw him.
It was a very simple greeting: the older man raised his two hands and opened his mouth in a quiet, happy gesture of surprise. Then he advanced toward the edge of the bar, and still maintaining his surprise, he proffered one of his thin hands to his son. Wesley clasped it firmly and they shook hands.
“Well, well, well . . .” greeted Mr. Martin gravely.
“Howdy, Charley,” said Wesley with a thin smile.
“Well, well, well . . .” repeated the silver haired, slim man, still clasping his son’s hand and gazing at him with mixed gravity and concern. “Where have you been?”
“All over,” answered Wesley.
“All over, hey?” echoed the father, still holding Wesley’s hand. Then he turned slowly toward a group of men who sat at the bar watching the incident with proud smiles. “Boys,” announced the father, “meet the kid. Drinks are on me.”
As the father turned sternly to his bottles, Wesley had to shake hands with a half dozen grinning barflies.
Mr. Martin ranged glasses all along the bar with the slow flourish of a man who is performing a ritual of deep significance. Bill, Meade, and Eathington took seats beside Wesley. When the glasses had all been filled with Scotch, Mr. Martin poured himself a stiff portion in a water glass and turned slowly to face the entire gathering. A deep silence reigned.